Archive for Inflation
Paul Krugman Boosts LMR Circulation
Wow, just when Carlos and I interview Peter Schiff in the November Lara-Murphy Report, Krugman rips into him here: Some readers may recall the “Peter Schiff was right” campaign of 2009, a sort of public-relations blitz claiming that Schiff, an Austrian-oriented commentator, had foreseen everything correctly. It wasn’t really true even then… What the heck?! [...]
Read moreUno Momento Por Favor, Senor Krugman
I am not going to bother employing my army of employees to fact-check this, but it looks plausible enough to quote and walk away… (HT2 somebody in the comments of an earlier post.) Paul Krugman, May 2012: Matt Yglesias, who just spent time in Argentina, writes about the lessons of that country’s recovery following its exit [...]
Read moreKrugman Ignores His Own Theory and Misses An Important Piece of European History
This whole “what danger is there for a country issuing its own currency?” argument is really slippery. First of all, what these people really mean is, “What danger is there for a country issuing its own currency and in which most of its debts are denominated in this currency?” I.e., even on their own terms, [...]
Read moreNoah Pinion Shows Yet Again That Economists Will Be Strung Up Right After Investment Bankers
[UPDATE below.] I knew right off the bat that Noahpinion was doing something wrong in this patronizing post on inflation, but it took me a minute to figure out where the error was creeping in. But don’t worry, I finally got it. Here’s Noah: Inflation is one of those things that almost nobody who isn’t [...]
Read moreKrugman on the 1920s: A One-Act Play
TOM WOODS & BOB MURPHY: The Keynesians are all wet when they distill their “lessons from the Great Depression” and recommend bigger deficits and looser money for today’s crisis. After World War I, the U.S. government had run up a massive debt, and yr/yr consumer price inflation was higher than 20%. In this grim situation, [...]
Read moreAn Interesting Measure of Prices
I am trying to get some historical statistics to deal with the claims that the Great Depression saw unprecedented action by central banks. Along the way, Daniel Kuehn pointed me to this intriguing chart of the NBER’s “Index of the General Price Level for the United States”: The constituents of the graph (and their weights) [...]
Read moreDifferent Kinds of CPI Bias
I am happy anytime GMU professors argue with each other, so I liked this recent post from Bryan Caplan: An argument I’ve repeatedly had with Tyler Cowen: Tyler: We’re stagnating! Bryan: No we’re not. You’re ignoring massive CPI bias. We live in an age ofconsumption-biased technological change. Official numbers don’t adequately adjust for quality improvements, [...]
Read moreClarification on Sumner, Congress, and NGDP
It is clear from the comments of my last post that, as usual, people are not fully appreciating the cogency of my analysis. Before diving in, let me make sure the casual reader understands why I’m spending so much time on this guy Scott Sumner, of whom most may never have heard. It’s not that [...]
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